HS Track: Crane's Garcia looks to take 200 title at state meet

Published 7:00 pm, Monday, June 1, 2009

Crane High School senior Isidro Garcia will get his chance to repeat as state champion, but it won't be in the event he won last year.

Garcia won the state championship last year in the 400, but was moved to the 200 this year in order to help his team win a regional or even a state championship.

The move didn't sit well with Garcia, originally.

"I would have rather qualified in the 400 any day, but now that I'm in the 200 I have to try my best to win in that," Garcia said.

Garcia will compete at the Class 2A state meet at Mike A. Myers Stadium in Austin on Friday and Saturday in both the 200 and as the anchor leg in the 800-meter relay.

The move hasn't been a smooth one for him, but his competitive nature wouldn't allow him to be defeated.

In making the transition, Garcia has had to overcome many challenges in his switch to a shorter event. One of those is getting out of the blocks quicker, which Garcia acknowledged.

Garcia is used to being able to get out of the blocks gradually and then speed up and overtake his opponents in the 400. In the 200, there is not enough room for him to do that, forcing him to figure out how to get quicker starts.

The lack of a quick start hurt him in the Region I-2A track meet in Odessa on May 20 when he finished second to Floydada's Aarrlton Flores, who had a great start and then held on at the end to beat Garcia.

"The only thing I need to beat him is to get out of the blocks as fast as I can," Garcia said. "When I ran against him, he was dying out. I just didn't have enough room."

So in the time leading up to the state meet, Crane boys track coach Henry Anderson and Garcia have been spending a lot of time practicing getting out of the blocks quicker in order to challenge Flores.

"If he can hold his own in the turn, I think he will be close," Anderson said. "(Flores) has just a great start. We have to do something about the start."

Anderson moved Garcia from the 400 to the 200 in March during spring break in order to help his team's chances of winning the regional and state championship.

"We needed him to run in the 800 relay," Anderson said "We felt certain that if we won the 800 relay and 1,600 relay that we were going to win."

The strategy almost worked. Had the mile relay team not been disqualified in the regional meet after an early start on the first leg, the Golden Cranes probably would have won the event and won the Region I-2A championship.

With a short recovery between the quarter and the 800 relay, a span of 10 minutes in between events, plus having to run the mile relay shortly after, it became impractical for Garcia to do both.

So he was stuck in the 200 where he could have more recovery time.

"He's a quarter-miler by heart," Anderson said. "It just didn't turn out like we had dreamed about with the other relay. We were going to have to win two relays in order to win the championship, and the mile and 800 were our best shot. Isidro is so unselfish to sacrifice that for the team."

Now that the conversion is almost complete, Garcia has one goal in mind.

"All I want to do is beat Aarrlton," Garcia said. "I don't like to get beat twice."